Issa Shivji has long been one of the most articulate critics of the destructive effects of neoliberal policies in Africa, and in particular of the ways in which they have eroded the gains of independence. In two extensive essays in this book, he shows that the role of NGOs in Africa cannot be understood without placing them in their political and historical context. Aid, in which NGOs play a significant role, is frequently portrayed as a form of altruism, a charitable act that enables the wealthy to help the poor. As structural adjustment programmes were imposed across Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, the international financial institutions and development agencies began giving money to NGOs for programmes to minimise the more glaring inequalities perpetuated by their policies. As a result, NGOs have flourished - and played an unwitting role in consolidating the neoliberal hegemony in Africa. If social policy is to be determined by citizens rather than the donors, argues Shivji, African NGOs must become catalysts for change rather than the catechists of aid that they are today. Issa Shivji is one of Africa's most radical and original thinkers and has written frequently for Fahamu's Pambazuka News. He is the author of several books, including the seminal Concept of Human Rights in Africa (1989) and, more recently, Let the People Speak: Tanzania down the road to neoliberalism (2006).

Food security and asset possession of small producers in developing countries has been severely undermined over many years. The old primitive accumulation of capital - by seizing resources from colonies - was only temporarily halted by independence struggles. Today the advanced capitalist world, whose large scale agriculture cannot meet its own consumption needs, angles to control the superior productive capacity of developing countries for both food and agrofuels. Monopolistic control of food distribution, increased prices of foods and farm inputs, and transnational capital's concessioning of land for food and agrofuel production have created a new scramble for land. At the same time neoliberal reforms have increased unemployment, deepened debt, led to land and livestock losses, reduced per capita food production and decreased nutritional standards. The dominant response to this agrarian crisis has been to reinforce the incorporation of the peasantry into volatile world markets and to extend land alienation, increasing import dependence. This book shows how the peasantry's increasingly active resistance has the potential to undermine political stability in third world countries. Patnaik argues that generating livelihoods and genuine development for the majority demands the encouragement of labour-intensive petty production, a rethinking about which agricultural commodities are produced, the redistribution of the means of food production and increased social investment in rural development. Food sovereignty requires policies that defend the land rights of small producers. Voluntary co-operation will permit economies of scale, higher productivity and incomes, and allow the mass of the people to live their lives with dignity.

Issa Shivji's book, first published in 1990 provided the first detailed analysis of the fundamental legal foundations of the union in 1964 between Tanganyika and Zanzibar which led to the birth of the United Republic of Tanzania. Used by students of law, politics and the Tanzania union as a basic reference work the book is a product of wide ranging scholarship and close analysis of legal texts that constitute the primary sources of the Union-and the author's long engagement with the morality of constitutional politics that bear on Zanzibar's status in the Union. Out of print for over a decade this second expanded edition includes a few minor revisions, comments and references have been put in square brackets to distinguish them from the original text.

The neoliberal project promised to correct multiple distortions in the African postcolonial environment. It pledged to engineer liberalisation and expand democratic space through competitive multi-party elections. For a people who had suffered years of statism, these promises were persuasive. Indeed they accorded this project a level of legitimacy it otherwise would not have enjoyed. Several decades down the line, Issa G. Shivji aptly asks Where is Uhuru? Few people, if any, can testify to the success of the envisaged reforms. Instead, neoliberalism failed to guarantee a sustainable basis for freedom, rights, and prosperity. These essays show that the reform period opened the continent to greater privation by a more emboldened local political class who, under pressure from or by acquiescing to foreign imperialist forces, undermined the struggles for democratic transformation and economic empowerment. Whether one is examining the rewards of multi-party politics, the dividends from a new constitutional dispensation, the processes of land reform, women's rights to property, or the pan-Africanist project for emancipation, Shivji illustrates how all these have suffered severe body blows. Shivji not only calls for a new, Africa-centred line of thinking that is unapologetic of the continent's right to self-determination, but through these essays sets out examples of how such thinking should proceed.

The "Washington consensus" which ushered in neo-liberal policies in Africa is over. It was buried at the G20 meeting in London in early April, 2009. The world capitalist system is in shambles. The champions of capitalism in the global North are rewriting the rules of the game to save it. The crisis creates an opening for the global South, in particular Africa, to refuse to play the capitalist-imperialist game, whatever the rules. It is time to rethink and revisit the development direction and strategies on the continent. This is the central message of this intensely argued book. Issa Shivji demonstrates the need to go back to the basics of radical political economy and ask fundamental questions: who produces the society's surplus product, who appropriates and accumulates it and how is this done. What is the character of accumulation and what is the social agency of change? The book provides an alternative theoretical framework to help African researchers and intellectuals to understand their societies better and contribute towards changing them in the interest of the working people.

The Pan-Africanist debate is back on the historical agenda. The stresses and strains in the union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar since its formation some forty years ago are not showing any sign of abating. Meanwhile, imperialism under new forms and labels continues to bedevil the continent in ever-aggressive, if subtle, ways. The political federation of East Africa, which was one of the main spin-offs of the Pan-Africanism of the nationalist period, is reappearing on the political stage, albeit in a distorted form of regional integration. It is in this context that the present study is situated. Backgrounding the major dramas of the union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar this book studies the personalities involved and their politics, and includes an account of the Dodoma CCM conference that toppled President Jumbe. It is also a detailed legal analysis of the union incorporating powerful new material.

The ninety essays contained in this book are selected by the author from his writings published in newspaper columns during the period 1990-2005, a critical time in Tanzania that witnessed the rise and fall of nationalism, and transition to and consolidation of neo-liberalism. The essays give an overview of the intellectual history and traditions in Tanzania, one of the few countries in Africa which can still boast of political stability and reasonable openness. The writings reflect the hopes and fears of the progressive intellectual community, and project a strong sense of the enduring ideas and values in the period. The author's aims are to recover the history of the recent past in Tanzania, build a narrative of where the country is coming from, and provide a historical understanding of the events and climate of the present.

Hitherto the human rights debate in Africa has concentrated on the legal and philosophical. The author, Professor of Law at the University of Dar es Salaam, here moves the debate to the social and political planes. He attempts to reconceptualise human rights ideology from the standpoint of the working people in Africa. He defines the approach as avoiding the pitfalls of the liberal perspective as being absolutist in viewing human rights as a central question and the rights struggle as the backbone of democratic struggles. The author maintains that such a study cannot be politically neutral or intellectually uncommitted. Both the critique of dominant discourse and the reconceptualisation are located within the current social science and jurisprudential debates.